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| We do not know whether Lord Raynham has at present
| anything on hand. If not, perhaps he will accept from
| us a friendly hint of a field on which his philanthropic
| energies may find a worthy object. Owing to the
| benighted condition of the age, many of his and his
| friends' recent enterprises have miscarried. Parliament
| absolutely declines to emancipate the fleas, or to
| establish a habeas corpus for
| the cab-horses, or to flog aggravating husbands, or to
| restrain maid-servants from the pernicious liberty of
| leaning out of window. He will therefore hear with joy
| of a case of oppression and suffering from which no
| Parliament, however hard-hearted, can turn away. As
| the knight-errant of the lower animals in general, and
| young women in particular, we invite him to an
| enterprise which will require and reward all his
| gallantry, in both senses of that ambiguous word. We
| only hope that when he has triumphed, and the
| wreathed offerings of grateful womanhood rest upon
| his brow, he will not forget the humble instrument to
| whose suggestions he will owe his glory.
| We have to inform him, then, that in this metropolis
| there is a vast district where all the horrors of

| "overtime"

are inflicted without remorse, and
| almost without limit, upon a class of young and helpless
| females. A large number of young women, from the
| ages of sixteen to thirty, living in the West-end of the
| town, are engaged in the manufacture of a certain
| article of general consumption. They are employed, as
| a rule, for fifteen hours a day on week days, and for six
| or seven on Sundays. But these fifteen hours are not
| the ordinary hours of factory labour. The working-day
| begins at twelve o'clock at noon, and ends at three
| o'clock the next morning; but it is not uncommon for
| girls to work at it even till five, for the chance of better
| pay. The business is carried on in a hot and stifling
| atmosphere, from which ventilation is carefully
| excluded; but at certain intervals in the process the
| workers have to move suddenly, bare-headed and
| bare-shouldered, into the cold night air. The dress in which,
| according to the custom of the trade, the manufacture is
| conducted, is so light and ill-adjusted as to increase to
| the utmost possible extent the dangers of this change of
| temperature. Fatal illnesses are not uncommonly the
| consequence of this enormous labour under such
| unhealthy conditions. The mental results are still worse.
| The manufacture in question is found to have the
| peculiar property of predisposing its victims to idiotcy;
| and of course, after the greater part of the day and night
| has been spent in exhausting toil, neither time nor
| strength is left for anything in the nature of self-culture
| or self-education to counteract its operation. The
| natural consequence is, that both the intellectual and
| physical development of this class of young females is
| very low, and constantly becoming lower. For their
| miserable toil the remuneration is wretchedly scanty.
| In pursuance of a peculiar custom it is paid in very
| unequal portions, and is moreover distributed by lot.
| Some of the young women who are lucky in the lot they
| draw, obtain an amount of recompence which may be
| said to repay even such labour as we have described.
| But the majority obtain little or nothing for their pains.
| Fed by hope, which the overseers of the factory
| culpably encourage, they continue their round of
| wearing and dreary toil for fifteen or even twenty years,
| and find themselves at the end even poorer than when
| they began. We need hardly particularize more closely
| to Lord Raynham the case of which we speak. The
| manufacture in question is that of

"small-talk"
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~~ an article which he probably does not consume
| ~~ and the young females who are employed for fifteen
| hours a day in producing it live chiefly in the
| neighbourhood of Belgravia and May Fair. It is indeed
| an opportunity for the interposition of philanthropists.
| There never was such a case for a short-time agitation.
| Even if Lord Raynham's own favourite panacea could
| be applied, and they could all be employed as
| linen-drapers' assistants, the lot of these unfortunate
| young women would be materially improved.
| These Belgravian young ladies are, indeed, very much
| to be pitied. The inexorable necessity of getting a
| livelihood somehow imposes upon them this pernicious
| toil; for without it husbands are, according to the
| traditions of Belgravian wisdom, not to be obtained.
| But, having forced this system on the young ladies,
| society turns round and abuses them for its results. The
| elder sons, to charm whose wearied and used-up
| existence this gigantic production of small-talk is
| carried on, actually have the effrontery to complain that
| the young ladies of the present day are stupid. We are
| not disputing the melancholy truth. There is no room
| left for disputing what is lamented, but admitted, on all
| sides. The demand that has sprung up for pretty
| horsebreakers is a sufficient proof that the legitimate
| article has become quite unmarketable. It is too true
| that the young-lady brain, whatever there was of it, is
| slowly wearing away. But it does not lie in the mouth
| of her hard taskmaster to reproach his victim with the
| injuries his own exigence has caused. Let the exacting
| parti who complains,
| deliberately count over the trials through which that
| brain has to pass, and then say whether any native
| strength of texture or excellence of preparation could
| avert the melancholy result. If he really wishes to
| probe the evil to the bottom, let him ask the next silly
| young lady with whom he dances to favour him with a
| diary of her occupations during the space of a single
| day. In the present state of the marriage market, such a
| modest request could not be refused to any thoroughly
| eligible young gentleman. When he obtains the
| precious document, he will find that the existence of the
| fair chatterbox at whose empty-headedness he has been
| marvelling consists entirely of a ceaseless round of talk,
| talk, talk. The occupation is never varied, but only the
| ostensible amusement under which the occupation is
| disguised. It may be the exhibition, in Rotten Row, of a
| hat copied after the last new horsebreaker's pattern. It
| may be the destruction of poor Aunt Sally's pipe on
| some hot suburban lawn. It may be the calmer delights
| of the

"kettle-drum,"

when the young married
| women talk over their husbands, and exchange hints
| upon conjugal strategy ~~ or the stiff diner, or the
| asphyxiating drum, or the revolution on one's own axis
| which is called dancing. These are only different
| modes of weaving the meshes of small-talk by which
| the angling maiden hopes to land her golden prey.
| During all these various occupations she must be
| chattering, ever chattering, about something. What that
| something is, all men who have suffered under it know
| too well ~~ the heat, the weather, the last party and the
| next, her neighbour's misconduct, and her friends'
| ugliness, and the general hideousness of every dress
| except her own. For fifteen hours out of every week-day
| her poor little brain, ill prepared by an education of
| mere accomplishments, must be spinning out of its own
| weak substance eternal talk upon these edifying topics.
| And these exertions are not confined, as formerly, to
| the season. No sooner is the season over than the
| country-house begins. Scotland for the autumn, and
| England for the winter, furnish a season pretty nearly as
| severe as that of London. The so-called gaiety is quite
| as constant, and the hours almost as bad. And, as recent
| experiments appear to many others to have established
| the superiority of country-house dissipation for
| matrimonial purposes, the manufacture of small-talk
| goes on more furiously than ever. Only, the
| opportunities for tete-a-tetes
| being very much greater, it is apt to become a good
| many shades more tender. But, whether mingled with
| the tenderness of the shrubbery or the pertness of the
| ball-room, on it must go without respite or relaxation,
| till a bridegroom capable of settlements has been won,
| or the chilling threshold of old maidship has been
| reached. Is it a matter of surprise that under such
| treatment a young lady's intellect becomes a vanishing
| quantity? It is rather wonderful that any portion of it
| survives ~~ even that small portion of it which
| subsequently reappears under the faded charms and
| developed outline of the fashionable mother. No other
| human being could go through such trials and retain
| even the rudiments of a mind at the end. The toughest
| intellects could not stand it. We should like to make the
| experiment on Mr. Gladstone or Lord Westbury, if
| either of those great men would sacrifice themselves in
| the interests of science. We entertain no doubt that if
| one of these grave personages were condemned to five
| years of hard fashionable labour, to spend all his
| waking hours in fashionable conversation, discussing
| balls and concerts, matchmaking and scandal, he would
| come out at the end with an intellect as nearly washed
| out as that of the most inveterate ball-goer in Belgravia.
| It is a consolation to think that in course of time the evil
| must cure itself. The system will cease as soon as it
| becomes clear, even to the obtusest mother, that it has
| ceased to pay. Already the tide of feeling on the male
| side is beginning to turn against it. Men do not relish
| the alternative, which is apt to befall the husband of the
| regular ball-goer, of either turning chaperon himself, or
| leaving that office to be more tenderly performed by the
| volunteer zeal of other young men. Mothers should
| take warning in time, and not invest in a falling stock.
| The market is turning. London girls are showing signs
| of heaviness, and country-bred girls are becoming
| firmer every day. A reaction will come soon, if they
| are not wise in time, and eligible elder sons will be seen
| scampering over the country, ransacking rural
| parsonages and retired manor-houses for wives. Evil
| days are in store for the mammas, if they do not
| compromise matters with the growing utilitarianism of
| the men. There is no knowing where a revulsion will
| stop. Times may come when nimbleness in playing
| polkas or dancing them will be looked on as an
| unpractical accomplishment, and when cleverness in
| imitating horsebreaker fashions will cease to attract
| admiration. Men may even come to be so prosaic as to
| wish that future housewives should know something
| about managing a household. Perhaps they may go so
| far as to desire that some traces of mental cultivation,
| however minute, should be discoverable in the
| conversation on which they are to depend for
| amusement during great part of their lives. Possibly
| they may even be so fastidious as to prefer to take their
| wives from houses in which scandal does not form the
| main topic of daily conversation. This is an evil
| prospect to put before the eyes of an honest Belgravian
| matron. She had better anticipate these dangers, and,
| by plenty of loud professions and a few unimportant
| practical concessions, make terms, while it is yet time,
| with the changing spirit of the age.